Top 48 Shute's Quotes
#1. Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.
Dorothy Parker
#2. If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.
Nevil Shute
#3. Half a thou too small," he said. "The difference between Right and Wrong. Half a thou bigger, and it'ld be Right. As it is, it's Wrong, and you can't cheat about it." He smiled again. "Too bad when God gives you the mind of an Inspector, isn't it?
Nevil Shute
#5. People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had," she said quietly, staring into the embers. "They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.
Nevil Shute
#6. The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it. What was important was that it was a bright, sunny day; her first narcissi were in bloom, and the daffodils behind them were already showing flower buds.
Nevil Shute
#7. I'm glad we haven't got newspapers now. It's been much nicer without them.
Nevil Shute
#8. To put your life in danger from time to time ... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.
Nevil Shute
#9. You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love.
Nevil Shute
#10. I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It's really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you'll find there's not a lot of competition;
Nevil Shute
#11. Here they go cruising for a fortnight up in parts where everyone is dead of radiation, and all that they can catch is measles!
Nevil Shute
#12. He was just entering the club ahead of me, a tall and rather emaciated man of about seventy, a little unsteady on his feet. He tripped over the doormat as he went in and stumbled forward; the hall porter jumped out and caught him by the elbow.
Nevil Shute
#13. When a good man employs others he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men.
Nevil Shute
#14. Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it ... Lovely.
Nevil Shute
#15. She lived in the dream world of unreality, or else she would not admit reality; he did not know. In any case, he loved her as she was. It might never be used, but it would give her pleasure to have it.
Nevil Shute
#16. Men' s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong tgem, God is well acquainted with what ye do.
Nevil Shute
#17. Security was now a thing of the past though it took a conscious effort to remember it; with no enemy in all the world there was little but the force of habit in it.
Nevil Shute
#18. I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly
Nevil Shute
#19. You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.
Nevil Shute
#20. Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that.
Nevil Shute
#21. When I was first sent from H.M.S. King Alfred to be interviewed by Goodeve in the Admiralty, I was furious. The War seemed to me, in June of 1940, to be desperately serious, and England in imminent peril of invasion.
Nevil Shute
#22. All those cities, all those fields and farms, with nobody, and nothing left alive. Just nothing there. I simply can't take it in.
Nevil Shute
#23. There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.
Nevil Shute
#24. After all that I had read during the night. Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.
Nevil Shute
#25. It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.
Nevil Shute
#26. It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers.
Nevil Shute
#27. An American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.
Nevil Shute
#28. So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war.
Nevil Shute
#29. Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes - not yet, anyhow.
Nevil Shute
#30. Into the world of romance, of make-belief and double brandies!
Nevil Shute
#31. If I have learned one thing in my 54 years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.
Nevil Shute
#32. The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.
Nevil Shute
#33. He said, "The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well." She
Nevil Shute
#34. Everybody pays lip service to the safety of the aeroplane, but nobody is prepared to pay for it.
Nevil Shute
#35. It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.
Nevil Shute
#36. He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars.
Nevil Shute
#37. When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries," she said, "there'll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.
Nevil Shute
#38. I never was in such a horrid office ... It's not very nice to be where people are being swindled all day long, is it?
Nevil Shute
#39. You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.
Nevil Shute
#40. It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.
Nevil Shute
#42. Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this.
Nevil Shute
#43. We are not like that, we engineers. We are men of understanding and of education, on whom is laid responsibility that men may travel in these aeroplanes as safely as if they were sitting by the well in the cool of the evening.
Nevil Shute
#44. Some games are fun even when you lose. Even when you know you're going to lose before you start. It's fun just playing them.
Nevil Shute
#45. She looked at him in wonder. "Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done."
"That's as it may be," he replied. "The fact is, that you did it.
Nevil Shute
#46. The thing most worth doing in this modern world [is to] create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work.
Nevil Shute
#47. After two wars, I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed, and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life.
Nevil Shute
#48. You felt to look at him that he would be wonderful upon a horse. I
Nevil Shute
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